The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten Read online

  “Hello,” he said, and while it wasn’t the first time I’d heard his voice, it was the first time he’d spoken to me, and a shiver started in the soles of my feet and the top of my head all at once, one shiver traveling up, the other traveling down, with both shivers meeting in the middle—well. Slightly lower than the middle, to be totally honest.

  I glanced at him. His eyes were focused intensely on me, and they were dark blue, like young stars. “Oh. Hi.” Back to my doodle. My interesting, interesting flowers.

  “My name is Edwin Scullen.”

  “Mm. I’m Bonnie. Grayduck.”

  He chuckled warmly. “Oh, I know who you are.”

  Promising. “Oh? Why would you pay any attention to someone like me?”

  “I think you’re certainly worth paying attention to,” he said earnestly. “And it’s a small school, a small town. You’re the police chief’s daughter. Why, you’re a celebrity.”

  This from one of the untouchable Scullens, but I didn’t get any sense of condescension or mockery from his tone, and those were tones I was highly sensitive to—since I often used them myself.

  Just then Mr. Whatever explained what we were doing with the microscopes (some bullcrap with looking at slides and identifying some other bullcrap), and I gave Edwin a hapless little smile. “Could you start? I always break the slides, I’m so clumsy.”

  Edwin heroically fitted slides in the microscope and peered through the eyepiece, and I looked in a few times too, and we drew pictures of the structure of whatever it was we were supposed to be looking at, and it was all strictly business. At one point his hand brushed mine, and it was ice-cold—that was a bummer. I was hoping to get Edwin into bed sometime, and cold hands also meant cold feet, which were no fun under the covers. Ah, well. Somebody that beautiful had to have something wrong with him, and lousy circulation wasn’t so bad, really. I was no closer to understanding why he’d been a total asshole before, only to be a gentleman this time. Maybe he’d been gone for a week of rehab or something—he did have a certain heroin-chic quality about him, all pale and everything, with the fine blue tracery of veins just barely visible beneath the skin of his wrists. But a week wasn’t long enough to kick any sort of habit. Mysterious. I don’t like mysteries, unless they’re mysteries I benefit from.

  Once we finished the lab—well in advance of the bleating sheep elsewhere in the classroom—he turned the searchlight of his attention away from tiny glass slides and back to me, where it belonged. “How do you like Lake Woebegotten so far? I know it’s hard to start over in a new town.”

  He was a transplant, too, I remembered. “Oh, I used to come here when I was a kid, to visit Harry—my dad. So it’s sort of familiar. It’s been, oh, maybe five years, but absolutely nothing’s changed, as far as I can tell.”

  “Lake Woebegotten does have a certain timeless quality, I’ve heard,” Edwin said. “My adopted father Argyle’s family lived here, oh, in the early 1900s. The house where we live, on the north side of the lake, way back in the woods? It’s been in the family for generations.” He cocked his head. An adorable gesture. He basically exuded adorable. How could he go from looking like a dangerous rock star one moment to cuddly boyfriend material the next? He was as changeable as floating clouds viewed under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms. “This must be very different from—where is it you’re from? Somewhere in California?”

  “Santa Cruz,” I said. “On the central coast.”

  “The name sounds vaguely familiar,” he said.

  “Ever see that old movie The Lost Boys?”

  His eyes widened. “Ah? The one about…”

  “Vampires, yeah, it has Pee-Wee Herman and Kiefer Sutherland before he got all old? The amusement park in the movie is the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Not that they called the town Santa Cruz in the movie, but it was shot there, maybe you heard about it that way. There were some serial killers there back in the ’70s too, I guess.” And more recently, though no one had realized that’s what I was. “Nowadays it’s mostly famous for, I don’t know. Hippies, surfing, the usual. It’s okay. Way different from Lake Woebegotten though, yeah.”

  “Not a lot of surfing happens in the lake,” Edwin said gravely.

  “Not a lot of ice fishing in Santa Cruz,” I said.

  Then Mr. Whatever came over and looked at our drawing and said we did a good job (though he was so bored and perfunctory, who knew if it were true; then again, who cared?). He moved on to the next table, and Edwin stared at me again. His lips looked delicious. “Why did you come here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Ah. Well, I was hardly going to tell the truth—a stupid girl died, and some people thought I might be indirectly responsible, and we thought it might be better if I finished up my senior year someplace else, where there wouldn’t be so much whispering and staring in the hallways. So instead I said, “My mom wanted to travel around with her boyfriend Dwayne—he plays arena football—but she felt bad about me being alone so much. And I hadn’t seen Harry in ages, so I figured, I’d come spend a little time with him before I go off to college or whatever.”

  “Don’t you miss the friends you left behind?”

  Time for a little creative storytelling. I looked away, pretending embarrassment. “My, ah, boyfriend… I had a bad breakup. Actually, he cheated on me with my best friend. So, no, I didn’t really want to see those people much anymore.”

  “Bonnie, I’m so sorry.” The sympathy in his voice was warm as melting butter. “A betrayal like that… how terrible. You deserve better.”

  Hmm. Sounded like he’d be faithful, but also suggested he’d be jealous. Both of which could be used to achieve various effects, of course. I looked at him, frankly. “So,” I said, “if I deserve better, why were you such a jerk to me last time we had a class together?”

  His eyebrows went up, but just then Mr. Whatever called our attention to the front and started pointing at some crap on an overhead projector. A few moments later the bell rang, and Edwin was—whoosh—gone.

  I’d spooked him. Oh well. I should’ve probably played up the wounded-bunny routine some more instead, but there was something about Edwin… I didn’t want to show him the real me, of course, but I didn’t want to hide myself utterly in a fake persona.

  Ike joined me as I left the room. “Saw you talking to Scullen,” he said, rather sullenly. “He seemed nicer today.”

  I nodded. “I still don’t know what his problem was, but he seems to be over it.” We went to gym class, where I pretended physical incompetence, as per usual, until I could finally get back to the only kind of competition that actually matters: real life.

  In the parking lot, I started up Marmon and drove slowly out of the lot. There was Edwin, standing by a Subaru station wagon with some of his faux-siblings. He looked up at me, and his eyes were the color of pale blue skies this time, almost ice-blue. Weird. I’d heard of eyes that changed color depending on a person’s mood, but that’s just dumb—any changes like that are just the effect of light reflecting differently off the iris, and the fact that the iris changes shape as the pupil dilates or contracts. But Edwin’s eyes were dramatically lighter now, so maybe….

  If so which mood did that particular shade of blue I’d seen in biology class indicate?

  I’d find out. It was a problem vulnerable to an experimental solution.

  GODS AND MEN

  AND SO FORTH

  NARRATOR

  Stevie Ray took his hat off when he entered the priest’s office, because it seemed like a show of respect was in order, even if Stevie Ray himself didn’t have any particular religion. He was, he supposed, technically an atheist, though it seemed to him just about everybody was an atheist: even Father Edsel, because even though he had faith in his Holy Trinity, there were thousands of other gods he didn’t believe in: Zeus, Ra, Ahuru Mazda, Yum Kaax, Tepeyollotl, Sakhmet, Napir, Bes, Gal Bapsi, and on and on. Stevie Ray’d found a book in the remainder bin at a going-out-of-business Borders in the Tw
in Cities called The Encyclopedia of Gods, and that thing was more than 300 pages long, nothing but the names of over 2,500 gods various people had worshipped at one time or another, or still did—gods they’d probably believed in enough to kill or die for (or at least change their diet or get up early on Sunday mornings for). And he’d heard that in Hinduism there were a hundred million gods, enough gods that every family could have one of their own if they wanted. Stevie Ray, who’d always fretted a bit about being spiritually bereft, had felt better when he realized that. Edsel and Pastor Inkfist—well, he wasn’t a pastor anymore, but still religious, no doubt—were almost as atheist as Stevie Ray was: he just believed in one fewer god than they did, and the difference between disbelieving in a hundred million gods and a hundred million and one gods just didn’t seem all that significant, really.

  It was a shame, in a way, though, because if Stevie Ray had believed in a god—or at least the right god—he might have worried less about the family of vampires living in town. As it was, in the absence of a god to pray to, he’d decided he had to go and talk to Edsel.

  Father Edsel wasn’t a tall man, but he was a big man, with a big personality, a big bushy beard, and wild eyes, like a biker gang boss who’d decided to take holy orders. He’d been a priest down in Texas or someplace, but he’d done something bad and got sent up here to Lake Woebegotten. Not the kind of something bad where he’d molested little boys or anything, though the church wasn’t above sending priests to tiny little middle-of-nowhere parishes for those offenses, either, or so Stevie Ray had gathered. More the kind of bad where he’d performed an exorcism on a little kid who turned out to have a neurological disorder, and gotten a lot of bad publicity for the church. Edsel was loud, formidable, pigheaded, bombastic, and other such adjectives, but he had a quality that Stevie Ray needed, mainly: he believed in evil, and in demons, and in abominations before the Lord, and such things as that, which had made it easy for Stevie Ray to convince him the Scullens and the Scales were actually vampires. It had been harder to convince him not to sharpen up a bunch of wooden stakes and round up some of the dumber parishioners and arm them with pitchforks and torches, though. But Edsel wasn’t stupid, and he’d seen reason eventually, and agreed to just keep a watchful eye. But now, Stevie Ray was worried, so he sat down with the priest in his office and sipped a cup of bad coffee and talked for some time while Edsel scowled at him from under those hirsute caterpillar eyebrows.

  “So you think a war is brewing, then,” Edsel said finally, leaning forward across his great oak slab of a desk.

  Stevie Ray sighed and shifted on his uncomfortable chair. The furniture in here was really terrible, the seating equivalent of hair shirts. “I’m not sure it counts as a ‘war’ when it’s five or six fellas on one side and six on the other, maybe it’s better to call it a feud or something, but yeah, I think the tribal elders and the Scullens—and the Scales—could come to blows over this thing. I don’t think the boy, Edwin, meant to stray onto the reservation, he was probably just tracking a deer and didn’t realize he’d hit their territory—it’s not like there are signposts out there in the woods. But technically it’s a breach of their treaty, so…” Stevie Ray shrugged. “I’m just concerned, is all. I’m trying to make things peaceful, you know, but—”

  “I’m not opposed to the devil-worshipping heathens from Pres du Lac killing the bloodsucking undead fiends, and vice versa,” Edsel said thoughtfully. “In fact, if we could manipulate this into a full-on war of evil vs. evil…”

  Stevie Ray pressed the heels of his hands to his eyeballs. Talking to Edsel gave him a headache. “Father, please, the elders aren’t devil worshippers. They hate vampires—or wendigos, as they say—worse than anybody. All right, all right, worse than anybody except you. But what I worry about is collateral damage. The Scullens haven’t bothered anybody in the years they’ve been here, and in a year or two they’ll have to move on anyway, because people will start to notice they aren’t aging and wonder why the ‘kids’ haven’t gone off to college. I was really hoping to keep things nice and quiet until they left, knowing they won’t be back for at least a few generations, long after it’ll cease to be my problem. But if they start trying to kill each other over a breached treaty, the town could get caught up in the mess.”

  “I am a man of action, Stevie Ray. What action would you like me to take?”

  “Just be ready. Get your… people ready. So if something does happen, we can step in, at least to protect the townsfolk. Vampires are tough, I know that, but the tribal elders tell me guns will slow them down and blades will cut off their heads and fire will burn them.”

  “And fragmentation grenades will fragment them, I’m sure,” Edsel said. “So the Interfaith Vampire Slayers may finally see action, then? How wonderful.”

  Stevie Ray nodded. Edsel had access to truly startling quantities of weaponry, mostly because of his crazy friend Cyrus Bell, who was widely believed to be the single most insane person in town, outranking even Gothic Jim the Satanist and that odd fella on the outskirts who talked to himself all the time, called The Narrator by those locals who called him anything at all. Cyrus ran Cy’s Rustic Comfort Cabins and Bait Shop, which had been pretty popular before the internet came along and allowed past guests to provide warnings for potential future guests, who mostly chose to give the place a pass after hearing about Cy’s warm and outgoing personality and the way he liked to stand in your doorway for three or four hours telling you about how the moon was a hollow spaceship full of alien biologists studying Earthlings like ants under a microscope and how he’d stopped wearing underwear entirely because underpants were an Illuminati conspiracy designed to lower the sperm counts of working-class men. Because of Cy’s assumption that some kind of attack—from space, or the government, or the depths of the earth on account of all the lava men down there—was imminent, he’d spent a lot of years going to gun shows, writing to fellas who put ads in the back of survivalist magazines, and acquiring various sorts of ordnance, which he kept in an old bomb shelter underneath one of the cabins which was eternally closed for renovation. Stevie Ray didn’t like knowing about that little treasure trove—his boss Harry would have been troubled, to say the least, at the quantities of explosives and such just inside the town limits—but it was sort of a comfort, what with the vampires and werewolves. Sure, silver bullets and wooden stakes were traditional, but a Saiga 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun with a ten-round magazine would take your head clean off whether you were man, beast, or some kind of beast-man. And then there were the rocket-propelled grenade launchers Cyrus had bought off a white supremacist militia who’d gone out of business recently. They’d get the job done, too, assuming the job was “utter obliteration.”

  “We could strike pre-emptively,” Edsel said. “Burst in on the Scullens en masse.”

  “Right,” Stevie Ray said. “And when Harry investigates, and traces it back to you and Cy and your buddies, you’d be okay spending the rest of your life in prison? Nobody believes in vampires, Edsel. And these ones haven’t even committed any crimes.”

  “Their existence is a crime against God and humanity.”

  “I thought you believed in redemption?” Stevie Ray said. “Isn’t that the difference between Catholics and Lutherans? Lutherans believe in predestination, and you don’t?”

  “That’s one of the differences,” Edsel said. “But there can be no redemption for the undead. You have to confess and repent and be absolved before you die—and they’re already dead. The fact that they’re still walking around… it’s a walking desecration. Besides, even if Argyle Scullen is telling the truth about subsisting on animals alone, he wasn’t always so scrupulous.”

  “He says he hasn’t killed a human being since the 1500s, Edsel,” Stevie Ray said. “And I know for sure he’s saved a whole lot of lives in the time since then. You’ve seen it yourself.”

  “There is no statute of limitations on murder,” Edsel said sternly. “In the eyes of man’s law, or
God’s.”

  I wish I could have more reasonable people as allies, Stevie Ray thought, but he was limited to the sort of people who’d believe in vampire doctors and high schoolers and werewolf Ojibwe, which didn’t leave him with a whole lot of choices. “I’ll be in touch, okay?” Stevie Ray said. “Don’t do anything until you hear from me?”

  “I will wait,” Edsel said, in his implacable prophet-on-a-mountaintop voice. “God’s judgment is long, and God’s will is undeterred by the passage of time.”

  After Stevie Ray left, Edsel got on the phone. “Cy? Listen: The Omega Scenario is almost upon us. Be ready.” He listened for a while, made a face, and said, “Yes, that’s right. The aliens will be here soon. They’ve been experimenting on people, as we’ve discussed, making wolf-human hybrids and bat-human hybrids and—of course, we shouldn’t talk on the phone. Yes, that’s right, there’s no telling who’s listening. Yes, Cy. I know. I agree. Cy. Take yes for an answer.”

  Edsel hung up and sighed. It would be nice to find allies who weren’t insane, he thought. But Cy had the guns, and he was righteous, even if he was misguided. Still—aliens! Ridiculous.

  Everyone sensible knew demons were the problem. And Edsel’s crack team of Interfaith Demon Hunters were the solution.

  Once he actually recruited them, anyway.

  ACCIDENT PRONE

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  So the next day I nearly killed Ike with my truck.

  I was driving Marmon to school, pulling into the parking lot. There’s a bit of hill right at the entrance of the parking lot, and the driveway slopes down to where the parking spots are—it’s really just an unlined field of oil-stained gravel. The slope isn’t huge (not even enough to sled down in winter, really), but it’s there, and the incline was enough to almost doom Ike.

  Marmon wasn’t complaining any more than usual, and I never felt remotely unsafe in him, since he could crumple any other car on the road like a beer can crushed against a frat boy’s forehead. Which turned out to be the problem.